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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

The DoD didn't pay Lockheed Martin anywhere near $1 trillion to develop the F-35. The $1 trillion plus figures you see are for total program lifecycle cost including a lot more than just development.

Back in 1996 when the DoD awarded initial JSF prototype development contracts to Boeing and Lockheed they actually prohibited those contractors from putting in their own additional funds. There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base after the end of the Cold War and the DoD couldn't risk having any of their few remaining prime contractors fail.

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> There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base.

Maybe from the military industrial complex that was pulling in billions annually. Everyone else hoped that we would scale back after the insane global c*%k measuring contest that was the Cold War.

In retrospect, was the peace dividend a good idea? We got a europe that couldn't protect itself, the US playing bombs in the desert for 20 years and building anti-terrorism focused systems which will have no value against a near peer adversary, a navy that forgot how to build good boats, and a general refusal to learn the always relevant lesson of "build more ammo"

But the US found Boogeymen to continue spending $800B per year to attack. Isn't that the goal of the army?

We did scale back. Military spending was cut back in real (inflation adjusted) terms at the end of the Cold War, and bottomed out as a percentage of GDP in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_dividend

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...

After 2001, military spending went way up of to fund the Global War on Terror. Most of that was a total waste and failure. Now the GWOT is essentially over and funding priorities have shifted to containing expansionist regimes in China and Russia (and to a lesser degree Iran) as part of Cold War 2. It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down to the minimum size necessary to defend the homeland, but you might not enjoy the results of letting hostile foreign powers dominate the rest of the globe.

The real spending went down a tiny amount despite the largest army of the world was no longer in existence and there was no credible threat what so ever.

I always love how people fall for the false military budgets, the war cost, the veteran health, the nuclear cost and a lot of other associated cost that is conveniently hid outside of the 'military budget' despite it very clearly should be in the same bucket.

> It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down

Ah the old 'anybody that doesn't believe absurd amount of military spending is an isolationist trope'. Never stops getting old that one.

How much should we cut the military budget? Please give a specific number and show your work.

We all understand that there is a huge amount of waste. But in practice it seems to be difficult to cut that waste without losing essential capabilities.

It's redundancy, not waste, in the majority of cases. Look at what's happened to the Russian army to see what happens when there's no redundancy built-in to your logistics and supply chain, redundancy is essential to the capability of US military might.

> There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base

Or everyone took the money and ignored what Present Eisenhower had to say.

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